What I'd like to see at SenchaCon 2013

What I'd like to see at SenchaCon 2013

I've given this some thought. I'd like to see how Sencha put together their massive CSS files. Which tools were used and what methodologies were followed. I'm not terribly interested in specific cross-browser techniques or Sencha Cmd although both are relevant. I'm interested in how you tackled and organized such a task and what patterns you followed in the creation of the style sheets. I would imagine that intermediate knowledge of CSS would be required to attend.

I think your expertise in this area would definitely help your customers craft an approach towards the development of their web apps. It's not necessarily Sencha product specific but it would be invaluable.

GXT definitely appears to have been snubed. Is GXT developement at Sencha halted? Is there a next release in the works? I was hoping to get access to the ExtJS4.x table features some day in GXT. Is there a roadmap for GXT anywhere?

"Will there be GXT sessions at SenchaCon?
We’re committed to ensuring the GXT attendees have a practical and productive experience, with direct access to the team for the latest product information, roadmap discussions, and technical guidance. We will have our GXT technical team at SenchaCon in full force, and they will be staffing a space dedicated to GWT/GXT for discussions, tech demos, and Q & A. We will also have the SenchaCon unconference sessions to discuss GXT topics nominated by the GXT community."

GXT is certainly still going with 2.3.0 and 3.0.5 released in the last several weeks, and 3.1 planned for later this year. As you can see above, we will have developers there, but won't be having giving traditional talks. Both Darrell and I are listed as speakers at http://senchacon.com/speakers/ - we'll have our own space to demo and chat, and the floor will be open to any topics that come up. I've got several mini-talks prepared, and we'll be happy to show off and discuss any current or roadmap'd features that you'd be interested in.

The roadmap for 3.1 officially includes the return of ARIA support from 2.x (now that GWT has a new ARIA library built in that we'll be taking advantage of), a theme builder tool along with more powerful appearances, as well any any fixes that we've been holding on to that require API-breaking changes, so can't properly land in 3.0. We also are rebooting the documentation for GXT, and while we'll have the complete job done by the 3.1 release, you can see the work already out there at http://docs.sencha.com/gxt-guides/3/.

Thank you very much for this response. It does make me a feel a bit better. Can you say if the Infinite Grid in ExtJS 4.X is on the roadmap., or am I going to be stuck with paging forever? I guess my request would be for GXT to wrap all of the ExtJS 4.X widgets. Theme builder would be very valuable. Basically, for me, I went from using ExtJS 4.X to using GXT at a new company. I miss everything and anything that was in ExtJS but is not on GXT. The grid is at the top of the list though.

Many people don't realize this, but GXT doesn't wrap Ext JS at all - and this is very deliberate. By writing (almost) all of our code in Java, we're giving the compiler much more information to work with, so that if you don't use a feature in a class, it knows enough to compile as much of it out as possible. We share ideas back and forth between the teams, enabling us each to take advantage of the browser workarounds or html structures that the other has developed, but each team builds their library to be as specific to their community as possible. The only code in GXT that is directly borrowed from Ext JS has to do with finding elements quickly in the dom - this is in the Ext.java class.